Abstract

The term "social sustainability" is not yet on the agenda or in sociology textbooks, just as there is a general lack of sociological engagement with the problems of ecology and sustainability. Although a productive environmental sociology has emerged as a field sociology in the meantime, a socio-theoretical, also time-diagnostic sociology of sustainability is still lacking. The article does not remedy this deficiency, but at least hints at why sociology has so far found it difficult to gain an original approach to sustainability in a complex and confusing constellation. By distinguishing between three conceptions of social sustainability (narrow, internal and broad) and four thematic dimensions (factual, political, organisational and epistemic), the conceptual field is opened up and sociological optimism is spread.

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